INTRODUCTIONTop

Une réception paradoxale is the title of Jacques Le Brun’s recent preface to Fenelon in the Enlightenment (Schmitt-MaaB, Stockhorst and Ahn, 2014: 7-12). The interpretation articulated does not seek to relativize analyses in the way that Michael Sonenscher had done some years earlier when arguing that “one reason for the immense popularity of Fénelon´s Telemachus during the eighteenth century was its clarity about the prospects for Europe´s future”, and in particular, his lucidity in perceiving that Europe “had to find a way to promote trade and prevent war” (Sonenscher, 2002: 275). Le Brun’s proposal, which is not confined to the “succès inmediat” of those Aventures de Télémaque, but also attempts to address the extraordinary fortune of Fénelon’s “autres oeuvres”, insofar as they “furent largement publiées, traduites, et lues dans tous les pays, en des milieux les plus différents”, points in another direction. It strives above all to prevent its “large diffusion à travers pays, langues et cultures”, in other words, its very “succès inegale”, from concealing the “contradictoire” dimension that impregnates the work and leads one to think a negative fashion of a process of linear and one-directional reception. Thus it places the emphasis on the ductility finally evidenced by the writings of Fénelon to be invoked from radically different political, moral and confessional positions that in turn thus projected a no less contradictory understanding of perhaps the most emblematic author of the pensée sociale catolique forged in the late 17^th century in the environs of the petit conseil (Cuche, 1991 and 2017).

That paradoxale dimension is certainly blurred in the chapter that the volume introduced by Le Brun devotes to the Hispanic aspect of Fénelon’s journey in the Enlightenment. This was inevitable given his own interest in calibrating the depth of the mark left by Fénelon’s teachings on the “cultural policy” of a Philip V who was himself indebted to him in terms of much of his training and education (Fernández-Santos and Muniain, 2014). The reception of Fénelon’s political and moral prose, and in particular of his Aventures de Télémaque, nonetheless aroused some genuine controversy in Hispanic literature throughout the 18th century, in spite of its elevation along with the Quijote to the altars of the monarchy’s reading preferences. The diversity of readings afforded to a specific fragment of those Aventures that of the image of Baetica as the embodiment of an idyllic form of sociability, and the variety of debates in which those different readings appeared, is evidence of this fact. After all, if throughout the century there was hardly any major challenge to one’s own culture the manifestation of which did not include the presence of that image, neither were there any in which the self-reflective capacities of that culture did not conjugate it in particularized fashion, in accordance with intellectual concerns and discursive pretensions that were not exactly homogenous.

This is what made it possible for Fénelon’s Baetica to appear in the texts of both advocates and detractors of the moral requalification of luxury; that it was present in both the texts of those who identified in Telemachus the supreme source of political inspiration and in the works of those who saw it as the incarnation of the invasive power of alien political and cultural models that threatened to obliterate the own means of comprehension; or that it was welcomed in some cases as a reliable guideline in order to proceed to immersion in the delicate territory of origins while others favoured its confinement to the specific domains of poetical fiction. Its presence was in fact so powerful that it even gave rise to what was perhaps one of the most singular episodes in the coordinates of not only Hispanic but the European reception of the Aventures: the elevation of an alternative image of Baetica of a satirical nature that was reflected in the very name of its sovereign: Telearch.

The understanding of that figure by Francisco Botelho in the mid-30s was, moreover, far from anecdotic. On the one hand, because the image of conquistador assigned to the monarch Telearch evidenced both intentional complicity with the new politics supported by the new dynasty, and with its revisionist policy for Italy, and outright rejection of the implications of the logic of the Homeric reduction of violence promoted by Hugo Grotius or Samuel Pufendorf in their redefinition of natural law and which Fénelon transferred to political language in refined neo-classical French (Adams, 2001: 24-26). And on the other, because the mould in which the character of that Telearch was forged was that of real monarchs like Ataulf or Ferdinand III, thus producing a first intersection of the reading of Fénelon with the discourse of neo-Gothicism. First and also unique, since fifty years later Juan Pablo Forner would be responsible for a new version of that same cross-linking, but with the difference that in his case the reign of Ferdinand III no longer served as an alternative reference to Fénelon’s Baetica, but as a historical materialization of the latter.

It does not therefore seem inappropriate to take into account, for Hispanic literature too, Le Brun’s clarification. That is the aim of these pages. And with it, maybe to provide a stimulus that might make it possible to continue defining the multitude of intermediate positions between autarchy and unconditional surrender that traverse the Hispanic culture´s relationship with the languages and the cultural and political models of the République des lettres.

TELEARCHTop

In the 1738 and 1739 editions of his Satyrae, Portuguese poet Francisco Botelho de Moraes e Vasconcelos included an epistle dedicated to the sapientissimo ac potentissimo Telearcho, Baeticae qvondam, nvung Elysii nemoris regnatori[1]. The Homerically inspired geography to which he thus entrusted himself appeared to require no further introduction. Re-issued at the same time, works like Baltasar de Vitoria’s Teatro de los dioses de la gentilidad effortlessly identified Baetica with a place of bliss and that of the Champs Elysees with the Olympus of the classical heroes who had sacrificed their lives for love of their country (Vitoria, 1737: I,IV, 474 and 477-485). Despite its brevity, there was reference in that letter to so wise and powerful a monarch and to the spatial imaginary he inhabited. Specifically, Botelho reminded Telearch of the time when, as sovereign of Baetica “you enlightened the Spanish with your work [and] the world with the glory of your name and the imitation of your laws”. And at the same time he celebrated the fact that the status he finally acquired as inhabitant of the Elysian forest ensured that he would enjoy “happily and immortally the company of heroes”. Thus was suggested, albeit implicitly, and with adherence to Homeric codes, a connection between his form of government as king of Baetica and his access to that exclusive pantheon of heroes. But no further details regarding the figure of Telearch were provided. Not because these were considered. But because Botelho was asserting his long literary pedigree and hence he came to manage by referral: “because in my Ancipriana Historia I thoroughly described the image of your majesty provided by the most venerable Lord of the Caves of Salamanca” (Botelho, 1738: 384).

The Ancipriana Historia was his Historia de las Cuevas de Salamanca, a complex and extravagant textual artifice. Addressing in quite singular fashion the register of the relationship between history and fable, Botelho offered a personal conjugation of a legend that had already been the object of monographic literary treatment by such prestigious authors as Cervantes, Ruiz de Alarcón or Rojas Zorrilla[2]. Presented as the initiatory experience of a poet who enters an arcane world in search of “supernatural instruction” for his compositions, the aforementioned Lord of the Cave, who after introducing himself as Time admitted to being Amadís de Gaula, and who was at all times accompanied by Minerva in the guise of Celestina, gradually imparted his lessons. First, the portrayal of the inhabitants and the forms of sociability in the Caves. Then, the reconstruction of their history since the moment of foundation before the Flood. And thirdly, the autobiographical narration of the formative itinerary that had preceded his elevation to the supreme status of Archwizard. And it was in relation to that account, full of “quijotescos” episodes, that he described his discovery of Telearch’s Sevilian court and indulged in a laudatory description of the “heroic virtues” and “the blissful dominions” of that monarch of Baetica.

Stripped of any desire to place himself above the law, and devoid of any pretension to a model of patrimonial control over the kingdom, the Telearch described by Amadís ruled “with a father’s affection and vigils” organizing his “state like a family”. His moral interpretation of the exercise of monarchic power was responsible for moderation in the levying of taxes, strict adherence to heroism as a principle of “access to and conservation of honours, titles and estates”, the elevation of the periodical convening of Parliament to the condition of fundamental law in the name of guaranteeing the public good, and the consideration of the nobility as the most “vigorous spirit of the civil body”. To all this was added his repopulation policy and his attentive care of agriculture. But also the establishment of factories from the firm conviction that “commerce and industry are the source greater wealth than nature”. This “harmonious” political and social order of Baetica also had a striking effect among those who, as was the case of Amadís, still retained a fresh image of the “anarchy” and the “disharmony of the empire” which some time before they had found in Fez. Their travels had led them from an empire in which “serfs despise the king, and the King despises the serfs”, to another in which “the king acknowledged and confessed that his greatness depended on his subjects”, and in which those subjects “admitted and acknowledged that their happiness depended on the king”.

And Baetica was not the only territory in which that happiness had materialized under Telearch’s rule, described by Amadís as “simulation of divinity” whose empire included even the “celestial orbs”, with “the land obeying his laws and the sky his merits”. The Archwizard also told the young poet that when that King had inherited the crown “his kingdom was Baetica, and when he sat on the throne he undertook to recover all the provinces that belonged to it”. What made him exemplary was in fact his rejection of any form of “contemplative life” and corresponding commitment to another “diligent and very active” lifer, which resulted in a vision of him “sword in hand, escorted by courageous and skilled generals and wise counsellors; the latter to exalt and bless his Kingdoms with sublime and just laws; and the former to conquer and unite under his sceptre new dominions in which might shine religion, justice and other virtues”. And neither was there any room for doubt with regard to what that status of conquistador involved: “he conquered Murcia, Valencia and Catalonia much to the joy of the vanquished”, noted Amadís, “who only regretted having lived for some tine unconquered”. If any kind of perplexity should arise, the praise of a strictly egalitarian territorial policy, in which any reader of Historia de Botelho’s Historia was sure to recognise the esprit and the language used in the recent jurisdictional reconfiguration of the Monarchy’ shape through the Nueva Planta laws, soon dispelled it: “Any community had the same privileges as the Court”, since under Telearch’s rule “there was one religion, one set of laws, one language, one currency, one uniform and ones also the affections; because there being no differences to render them discordant, they loved one another and united in the quest for utility and shared glory” (Botelho, 1734: 233-249).

The dialogue between Amadís and the poet witnessed by the narrator in Historia did not end here, although by this stage the profiles of Telearch and Baetica referred to by Botelho in the first editions of his Satyrae were already identified and clearly defined. Yet to come in the pages of that Historia was the description in greater detail of the former’s time spent with Telearch, or the long list of events surrounding his return to the Cave and his promotion to Archwizard to replace Oxyartes, finally leading to a reflection upon language and poetry which included minutely detailed consideration of a specific text: Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque, which Botelho was clearly well aware of earlier, in book IV of his Historia, when shaping his personal image of a Baetica ruled by Telearch. An odyssey of political initiation composed by Fénelon in his role as tutor to the Duke of Burgundy and first published in April 1699, the Aventures were not a minor reference in this respect (Le Brun, 2002). On the contrary. They were responsible for the protagonism that Baetica had acquired in some of the most intense political and moral deliberations that when Botelho was writing were taking place in the inner sanctums of the incipient enlightenment (Hont, 2008).

TÉLÉMAQUETop

Under the guidance of Minerva embodied in the figure of the wise Mentor, during his eventful Mediterranean journey, Telemachus, son of Ulysses and future King of Ithaca, would acquire direct knowledge of the diverse manifestations of monarchic rule. Some were despotic and debased, corrupted by luxury and the spirit of conquest, like that of Pygmalion or the rule established by Idomeneo after his arrival in Salente. And others virtuous and even excellent, such as those of Sesostris in Egypt, Minos in Crete or Baleazar in Tyro, examples of the virtues of a rule respectful of the law, dedicated to the public good and removed from great flights of fancy. From the contrast between both kinds, emerged one of the most prevalent teachings in the Mentor’s discourse: on the one hand, that despotism and luxury were the two evils that inevitably led to decadence and the ruin of political institutions; and on the other, the hierarchical arrangement of both, with reiteration of the fact that while despotism entailed the debasement of the monarch, luxury resulted in the corruption of the entire nation (Schuurman, 2012; Bonolas, 1987). But the description of Baetica that Telemachus and Mentor heard from Adoan, the Phoenician captain of the ship in which they fled the isle of Calypso, presented them with a qualitatively different form of sociability, genuinely typical of the Golden Age. On the banks of the River Guadalquivir, in a fertile land with an agreeable climate, its happy and austere inhabitants, free and equal, who abhorred war and abstained from all forms of commerce and navigation so as to avoid the corruption implicit in these activities, led a frugal and comfortable life based on agriculture and livestock, detached from luxury and money, in which they required neither cities, political status, private property, inequality nor rank.

Full of Utopian images, the Baetica that emerged as the most elevated manifestation of a material civilization unconcerned with luxury found its inspiration in Les moeurs des israélites published in 1681 by abbot Claude Fleury, with whom Fénelon shared the intellectual and programmatic avant-garde of a Christian agrarianism radically opposed to Louis XIV’s mercantilism and aggressive expansionist policy (Rothkrug, 1965: 234-298; Sutcliffe, 2003: 56-57). Modelled on sacred history, Baetica played a role equivalent to that played by the state of nature in the reasoning of the iusrationalist authors. The deepest substance of Baetica was in fact plainly evident when contrasted with the vision of the kingdom of Salente ruled by Idomeneus in which Telemachus and Mentor arrived shortly after listening to Adoan. Unlike the idyllic Baetica, and as antithesis of the latter, Salente appeared before them as the irrational kingdom of luxury, passions, bad government and war. Authentic keystone of the rationale behind the Adventures, the contraposition between that monstrous Salente and Baetica did not end here. If Istvan Hont observed some years ago that the Aventures may be understood as a tripartite History of luxury it is precisely because the narrative sequence that introduced a Baetica removed from luxury, and continued with a Salente impregnated with the latter, was finally concluded with the announcement of the ambitious reforms undertaken and completed by Mentor for the kingdom of Idomeneus (Hont, 2008: 379-387).

This reform did not represent any attempt to resurrect the moral order of Baetica. Its imitation was considered impossible in a complex society that had already experienced the state of luxury, commerce and war. It was more a case of healing the wounds incurred during that state by means of a legislative intervention that, basically, was articulated around five poles: the dismantling of the urban economy of luxury via the promulgation of sumptuary laws and an agrarian law; the creation of a port modelled on Tyro, but subjected to draconian regulation that would restrict commerce, in similar fashion to manufacturing, in a manner complementary to agriculture and the covering of basic needs; renunciation of a policy of conquest to seek in its place the confirmation of Salente as pointer of the balance of powers in its area; the establishment of a hierarchical social system divided into seven ranks, at the apex of which were the most ancient aristocratic families; and the promotion of a system of education and public instruction aimed at sponsoring the contention of passions and interests and stimulating pur amour for order. That concept of a pure and disinterested love that had prompted his argument with Bossuet, and had finally exposed him to pontifical censorship, in reality emerged as the essential moral substance of the esprit of that reform (Le Brun, 2004). Returning to the language of his Explication des maximes des saints, and of some of his other pastoral and theological writings, and especially of his essay Sur le pur amour: sa possibilité, ses motifs and of his Instructions et avis sur divers points de la morale, Fenelón not only postulated a love of God revealed to be completely disinterested in its divesting of any consideration with regard to one’s own salvation or individual condemnation. Restoring the distinction between concupiscence and charité watered down by Blaise Pascal and denied by Pierre Nicole or Malebranche, that pur amour also came to be conceived as the opposite of amour-prore, which was also stripped of any virtuous essence or socializing goodness, thus establishing the essential substance of the sense in which the Adventures defined their double operation of repudiation of luxury, and the social and economic order which it inspired, and the corresponding ascension of disinterested love as the authentic seed of sociability and of every political virtue (Keohane, 1980: 332-357). For that very reason, in spite of all his imperfections, even Idomeneus himself could supervise that task of refoundation. However, it was not only essential that a previously poorly advised and poorly instructed king vis-à-vis the correct principles of government, ignorant of the material reality of the kingdom, should complete his metamorphosis into a roi philosophe. He also had to undertake a moral reshaping of his political condition. Hence, capturing the essence of the vocabulary of the Adventures which has led Patrick Riley to speak of a “republican monarchism”, one of the first people to read Adventures, Basagne de Beauval, echoed the insistence with which Fénelon repeated “les rois ne sont faits que pour les peuples; qu’ils sont assujettis aux lois, que le roi est l’homme de son peuple, et qu’il est plus juste qu´un seul serve a la félicité des peuples, que non pas les peuples servent par leur misére a flatter l’orgueil d’un seul” (Riley, 2007; Basagne de Beauval, 1699: 276-278).

Neither did Basnage de Beauval need to be a visionary however to perceive that this insistence upon the demarcation of the moral and political foundations of monarchic rule encouraged an allegorique reading of the text (Kapp, 2010). He did not feel, certainly, that reiteration was necessary in the instruction of whom was merely called upon to “regner dans une bicoque telle que l’ile d’lthaque”. It is of little significance in this respect that years later Fénelon claimed an uncommitted intentionality in the writing of those Adventures, pointing out in this regard that his only intention in composing that “narration fabuleuse en forme de poeme héroique” was that of providing the Duke of Burgundy, as future king of France, with aseptic and complete instruction with regard to “toutes les vérités nécessaires pour le gouvernement, et toutes les défauts qu´on peut avoir dans la puissance souveraine”, without because of it, nor for it, including “aucun portrait ni caractère” of reference[3]. As was evidenced by Basnage de Beauval’s comments, since their publication in April 1699 it had been clear that the Adventures were at least open to being read and understood as a complete amendment of the treasury-based economic policy of Colbert and the spirit of conquest of Luis XIV. The text’s immediate editorial success and its author’s fate soon confirmed this (Le Brun, 2010). Less than a year after its initial publication Adventures had been re-edited an unusually large number of times and had been translated into English, German and Dutch, while Luis XIV ordered the withdrawal of the privilege granted for its printing in France and arranged Fénelon’s exile to the Archbishopric of Cambrai, where he would remain until his death in 1715.

In fact from that moment onwards there were even those who insisted on criticising Fénelon precisely because he was obliging the reader to undertake the hermeneutic task of an allegorical reading. Among far from generous declarations with regard to its poetic value, like that issued by the legislator of the Parnassus of neo-classicism, Nicolás Boileau, or by Beauval himself, branding Fénelon’s “prose poetique” as “enflé et guindé”, and while Bossuet made sure to publicize his opposition to a text he had no hesitation in describing as “peu digne d´un prette”, a French Huguenot exiled in Holland, Nicolás de Gueudeville, set the standards in this respect. Far from acknowledging that this hermeneutic task was facilitated by Fénelon’s ability to write “selon le goût des peuples, et principalement des peuples qui, comme les Français, ont le plus senti les mauvaises suites de la puissance arbitraire, qu’il a touchées et bien exposées”, Gueudeville began by extolling the great value and proven validity of the “maximes politiques et morales” present throughout the Adventures and went on to exhibit his absolute opposition to the fact that “vérités si grandes, si belles et si solides” should be “enveloppées dans le mensonge et dans la fictión”; in other words, that the disqualification of Luis XIV’s policies were not expressed in more explicit manner (Rosenberg, 1982: chap. IV).

ATAULF AND THE STUDENT KINGSTop

“This work was welcomed in regions of the north”, recalled Francisco Botelho in his Historia upon beginning his appraisal of the Adventures, “because they believed it to be a satire against the maxims of a certain rival monarch”. Such a lucid observation regarding the warm reception given to the Aventures in certain European latitudes was followed by a much more personal and culturally significant interpretation of the dynamic of its reception: “with this recommendation it passed to other nations that understand with outside understanding”. By thus placing the question under the cipher of the abandonment of the own comprehension, Botelho was therefore not analysing the European success of the text exclusively through his own approaches to reading, but also in the light of the strengths and weaknesses of the capacity for self-reflection of the cultural bodies that received it. And this was not, by any means, a fortuitous analytical position. On the contrary, the fact that this dynamic of abdication of one’s own understanding could be extended to the particular cultural sphere with which Botelho identified was by his own admission his reason for settling scores with Fénelon’s work. In the 1734 edition of the Historia, which was presented as an “extended “ and “adapted” second edition, and with the admittedly false imprint of León de Francia, Botelho even referred to the specific circumstance that led him to speak out in this respect: “I hear that a Portuguese engineer recommended this book to His Highness the Prince of Brazil as a mirror with which to embellish his spirit”. And he outlined the sense in which that initiative concerned him: “that distinguished youth has so many glorious practical examples to emulate in their progenitors that it would be a crime to distract him from these and towards the chimerical speculations of the Adventures of Telemachus” (Botelho, 1734: 343).

That fragment, which fitted naturally into the edition of 1734, dedicated A la serpiente que es timbre del regio escudo de Portugal, disappeared in the 1737 version dedicated to the Real Academia Española[4]. In neither case however was there any change to either the strategy for approaching the Adventures, anchored via a prior reflection on the part of the Archwizard Amadis upon “language and poetry, principally epic and heroic poetry”, or the determination to frame the process of its reception in terms of the invasive potential of foreign interpretations that were eroding intrinsic cultural references. The variations between the two editions did not affect in the slightest the emphatic manner in which Botelho denied the Adventures the status of epic poem (Álvarez Barrientos, 1991: 189-190). And not only because they were written in prose, but adding criteria of poetic structure that began with the declaration that “there could hardly be a poem without a hero and without action”, before claiming that “the action of the alleged poem, rather than most distinguished, is most vulgar”, and insisting that “one cannot have a hero who is not of the utmost sublimity, in other words, a monarch, and if possible, founder of the monarchy”, a rank fulfilled on the contrary by Telearch, who, “conquering the greater part of the empire, and by dint of his virtues and deeds the most supreme example of the August, founded the monarchy” . The fact that this involved explicit acknowledgement that neither were his Nuevo mundo, with Christopher Columbus as central figure, or Lucano’s Farsalia worthy of being termed epic poems was a price that Botelho was more than prepared to pay in order to lend greater emphasis to his opposition to “the Adventures of the son of Ulysses” being seen and accepted “as instruction for princes or an example for writers”.

The distance between the images of Baetica presented in the Historia and the Adventures, and between the very figures of Telemachus and Telearch, the mere imagination of which perfectly condenses and reflects the satirical dimension of Botelho’s writing, were without a doubt the clearest expression off the deployment of that endeavour. That satirical stamp did not however prevent his call to contemplate the Adventures with suspicion from slipping into more generic reasoning: “I have the same reservations about this work as about other books that present Kings with documents” and “prescribe them rules of good government”, said Amadís, who then, and after alluding to the geniuses who suggested to kings the pertinence of engaging in the study of Tacitus, ironically concluded that “it would be good if in the extraordinary multitude of strange incidents that occur in government, the king were to go, in order to decide on each, as do lawyers, to hear what the authors have to say” (Botelho, 1734: 332-333). Thus Botelho established a connection, albeit in very personal fashion, with a rhetoric of disaffection towards essays conveying trans-historical political knowledge (Iñurritegui, 2015). Already established in Hispanic literature some time before, at the same time Benito Jerónimo Feijoo was taking it to one of its highest levels with the discourse on Libros políticos included in the fifth volume of the Teatro Crítico Universal published in 1733 (Fernández Albaladejo, 2007). A little earlier, in 1729, on the occasion of the third part of that Teatro, Feijoo himself had already anticipated the essential predicate of that discourse, declaring in aphoristic fashion, in La ambición en el solio, that “the appropriate time to bring forth treaties of righteous politics is only when those very politics are practised”[5]. And La ambición en el solio was precisely the text that accommodated Fénelon in the encyclopaedic parallels and meridians of the Teatro. Which did not mean, in any case, that it anticipated the critical reception that afterward had to draw up to him the Historia.

In fact, and despite a fragment of the 1734 edition in which Botelho boasted about Feijoo’s complicity with the Historia, his discourse outlined a radically different strategy with regard to consideration of Fénelon’s work. La ambición en el solio wove two genuinely Fenelonian motifs with a language that appeared to have been taken straight from the Adventures. On the one hand, criticism of the “unfair cult” historically offered to “conquering princes”, insisting in this respect that “applauding them like heroes” was tantamount to “debasing such a noble epithet”, with the tendency that involved towards the novel identification of heroism with literature stimulated by what Ruth Hill has termed literary absolutism and which was so difficult to reconcile with the conquering image of Telearch (Feijoo, 1729: 270 and 274; on the concept of literary absolutism, Hill, 2000: 4-7 and 222-223). And on the other, fixing as allele also dominant of the genetics of those conquering princes of an “aspiration to despotism” and as premeditated inhibition vis-à-vis virtuous political logic according to which it was imperative for any sovereign to understand “that the most difficult, and therefore the most glorious part of being King, is not conquering new Kingdoms, but ruling well over those he possesses”(Feijoo, 1729: 276 and 286). Placed thus in his sights “princes who, occupied with the desire enlarge the empire at any cost, will seek to extend it as much as possible abroad, but also at home”, Feijoo perceived an essential antidote against these in “the election of Tutors to govern the childhood of Princes”. And going a step further, “in the Tutors themselves, in the choice of maxims that must inspire their pupils”. A complex antidote to prepare given that acknowledgement that “the use of good books is very useful to inform princes of righteous policy” did not alter the crucial question: “But which are the good books?” Anticipating then some of the arguments of his subsequent discourse on political books, Feijoo’s answer was categorical: “I believe that very few. Those containing wise doctrine are infinite in number. But what does it matter if they instruct but do not move?” And precisely in the light of this conviction would such significance be attached to the fact that he went on to nominate “the collection of fables” by the “venerable Archbishop of Cambray Francisco de Salignac” as one of the very few valid and reliable references of compilation “those tenets that compose the most Christian politics” worthy of observing in such a vital crusade (Feijoo, 1729: 272, 279 y 282-283).

Far from the underlying concern in Botelho’s satirical vision, in Feijoo there was in fact not the slightest evidence of the stealthiness that the author of the Historia must have felt upon learning of the intention to include the Adventures in the Prince of Brazil’s educational programme. On the contrary. “I have owed the works of this excellent author”, openly admitted the Benedictine, “to the liberality and love of the Marquis del Surco, most worthy tutor of the Most Serene Lord Infante Don Felipe, who in his instruction uses the doctrine of that admirable prelate, of whom was intimate friend” (Feijoo, 1729: 283). It is true that in this case the Fables and not the Aventures was the referenced text. This by no means however lessened fundamental differences the texture of which perhaps emerged more clearly when, upon analysis of the twists and turns of the Castilian language, and far from advancing in the terms of Feijoo’s Paralelo entre las lenguas, Botelho indicated with the utmost expressiveness and evident defiance that “the French language has its head in Paris and its tail in the nations that idolize any useless foreign role” (Botelho, 1734: 307). Linguistic consciousness and more extensively cultural consciousness struck Botelho as the primary wall of contention against of what he understood as a not merely expansive but also genuinely invasive dimension of French culture. Hence his call to defer the debate over the origin of the language: “whether the dominant Celtic tongue was that of your earliest ancestors, or whether the first settler in Spain gave you another, there is no point checking, since what you speak now is the daughter of Latin”. And hence, too, the no less vigorous appeal for its rapid stabilization: “if the Real Academia de Madrid had concluded and perfected its dictionary of the Spanish language it would be a most glorious and useful book for Spain, as we would have a secure foundation with which to work” (Botelho, 1734: 306 y 311).

That call and that appeal were really the links in a chain in which it was also clear that, if it was a question of instructing the prince, there were among the authors themselves “more possible and more well-.expressed warnings”, with direct reference, in the 1734 edition, to the works of Antonio Vieira or Juan de Cabrera, to Las cinco piedras de la honda de David of the former and the Crisis política determina el más florido imperio of the latter (Botelho, 1734: 352). The definition that in the Crisis Cabrera gave of politics as “science of sciences”, and the interpretation of the latter he defended when claiming that “politics is not a speculative science that looks at universals, but rather at the circumstances of time and place”, were also what enabled Botelho directly to attack the image of philosopher king: “some might exclaim Blessed is the kingdom where philosophers reign or kings philosophize! But it is the philosophers who say this”. Always in clear opposition to the stamp of Cartesian rationalism in the understanding of political power, the very history of Spain then came into play to illustrate that “we should wish kings to be perfect kings and philosophers perfect philosophers”, because “the goal of philosophy is the happiness of the individual and that of politics the happiness of kingdoms” (Hill, 2000: 213-223). And thence to the contrast between Ferdinand the Catholic and Alfonso X the Wise:

“Amongst the kings of Spain, I call Ferdinand the Catholic, owing to the great talent with which he reformed and perfected the Monarchy, Ferdinand the Wise. And Don Alfonso the wise, for his so compelled knowledge, I give him the name of Alfonso the Student. King Don Alfonso adjusted the Trepidation, and he did not know how to adjust the government of his kingdoms. He penetrated with his cleverness the orbs, and he did not know how to preserve the empire offered, nor the inherited crown. These are the successes and this is the wisdom of the student kings” (Botelho, 1734: 336-338).

Nonetheless, Ferdinand the Catholic was not Botelho’s main reference in this respect. That role was reserved for Ferdinand the Saint and for Ataulf, whose invocation represented the maximum expression of the neo-Gothicism that impregnated the Historia, and particularly its seventh and final book. The image of the former, “escorted by courageous and skilled generals and wise counsellors”, the soldiers “to conquer and unite under his sceptre new dominions in which might shine religion, justice and other virtues”, and the advisors “to exalt and bless his Kingdoms with sublime and just laws”, was the mould in which the figure of Telearch was cast. While the latter, who “successfully prepared for his to be the most sublime of all nations”, embodied the monarchic model that Botelho was so eager to defend rather than the barbarian and archaic reputation attributed to him in the name of the primacy of literature and the arts by the république des lettres: Ataulf “could barely write”, but “could read and understood enquiries, treaties and renditions, alliances, warnings and the documents in his power; in short, he knew how to win and how to rule”. There was even room, further exploring the antipodes of the Fenelonian discourse, to evoke Luis XIV himself as a model of the intersection between the application of “politics and arms” and the promotion of the “arts and sciences”. Or to quote Anquises’ speech in the sixth book of the Aeneid (Botelho, 1734: 339-340). But the canon was set by Ataulf, his triumph over the Emperor Honorio, “given to literature and very erudite, and for that reason an unskilled professor in the chair of royalty”, or the way in which “he founded his reigns upon the most noble military art” to later in peace instil “in his laws the same constant vigour present in his arms” (Botelho, 1734: 240-241 and 338-341).

Soon Ataulf himself would attain renewed protagonism, with the tragedy of Agustín Montiano, and even earlier in the debate over the identity of the first of the Gothic kings to whom on the occasion of his foundational festivities would be presented the recently inaugurated Academy of History. An expression of the significance being attached to the question of orígens, Ignacio de Luzán and Martín de Ulloa would declare within this deliberation Ataulf’s status as founder of the monarchy, contrary to the opinion of Francisco Manuel de la Huerta, which was thus a return to the position of Juan de Ferreras or the Marquis of Mondejar (Fernández Albaladejo, 2006). By then however Botelho had already issued his verdict, with the importance that would be acquired within his reasoning by the attribution to Ataulf of that essential foundational status that differentiated, as a matter of principle, Telearch from Telemachus.

THE POEM OF EVERY NATIONTop

Neither before nor after would the Aventures receive throughout the Hispanic 18th century such an ambitious and profound criticism as that provided by Botelho in his Historia. His work, so open to fable, bookish fiction and classical mythology and to the defence of a particular political model the essence of which he considered to be embodied by Ataulf or Ferdinand the Saint, represented a complete break with the texture of the first works in Spanish in which had been noticeable the influence of the Adventures. Ultimately, works like the two journeys play by José de Cañizares entitled Un precipicio con otro: Calipso y Telémaco, premiered on January 22, 1723 in the De la Cruz theatre by José de Prado’s company, or Telémaco en la isla de Calipso, a poem in royal octaves composed between 1701 and 1705 by Pedro Bermúdez de la Torre in Lima, where a copy of the Aventures had arrived in 1701, in the ship bringing the news of the death of Charles II, had a clear common nexus: the absolute depoliticization of a narrative that was this reduced to the unashamedly romantic level of Telemachus’s journey (Rose, 2006: 437-471; Godinas, 2001; Cañizares text in Biblioteca Nacional. Mss. 1533). But in turn neither did the Historia have continuers to maintain the process directed towards isolating the Aventures as a model “unworthy of imitation”.

Of course, that Historia by Botelho in which Mayans acknowledged “overflowing imagination” and “prodigious inventiveness”, did not end with its satirical reading of Fénelon’s work (Mayans, 1753, 160). And its combative discourse on the nation’s heroes would find collusion even beyond the presence acquired by Ataulf in the Fastos of the Academy of History. The mention included in the 1734 edition of the authors who praised his work, from Benito Feijoo and Martín Sarmiento to Anselmo de Lira or José Pérez, was not mere rhetorical waffle. And neither was the reference to the academics who had spoken in similarly glowing terms in the captatio benevolentiae which was his dedication to the Real Academia Española of the 1737 edition of his Historia. Not unrelated to this was the fact that these included Tiburcio de Aguire y Ayanz de Arbizu, who in 1731 congratulated José Francisco de Isla because his admittedly and premeditatedly unfaithful translation of Espit Fléchier’s Histoire de Théodose le Grand had returned to “erudite Spanish lovers of the glories of our homeland” the figure of the “hero Teodosio, the greatest of his kind ever to have been produced by our nation, or any other”. Isla’s particular and highly significant modification of the title, El héroe español. Historia del Emperador Theodosio el Grande, illustrated moreover that Aguirre and Sanz’s was not a free interpretation. El héroe español, in Isla’s words, sought Teodosio’s restitution to his “patrician nation”, in other words, the renationalization of a “martial prince and august hero” who thus he said “becomes Spanish again” (Isla, 1731: Preface). Botelho’s Historia, in this sense, did not appear at all isolated, even when an alternative conception of heroism was also being advocated then in literature (Hill, 2006).

Another very different thing however was that in that crusade the Aventures continued to be regarded as the idol that had to be torn down. In fact, in 1756 José Linares y Montefrio translated into Spanish a work that that was poles apart from the poetic and political consideration attributed to Fénelon by Botelho: the Discours de la Poésie Épique, de l´Excellence du Poème de Télémaque incorporated by Andrew Ramsay into the decisive and definitive edition of the Aventures (París, 1717) that had been entrusted to him by the Marquis of Fénelon (Ramsay, 1756; Mansfield, 2014). Nothing in that Discours interested Ramsay more than decreeing that the Aventures were a “poem for every nation and for every century” blending “the morality of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad with the traditions Virgil’s Aeneid” and which contained an entire system that meshed “the most perfect politics with the ideas of the most consummate virtue”. Fénelon, said Ramsay, provided detailed knowledge of “the secret springs of passion, the duplicities of self-love or the difference between solid and false virtues”, thus avoiding the danger of his conversion into an “idolizer of himself”. Likewise, categorically described “the objective of his Politics” as the imperative primacy “of the public over the individual good”, within a monarchic enterprise directed at “enriching one’s states without indulging in luxury” and “finding the middle way between the excesses of a despotic power and the disorder of anarchy”. And neither did he omit to provide a vision “of the entire world as a universal republic”, advocating that one should no longer look “at each nation as independent of the rest”, but “as humankind as an indivisible whole”. Quite the opposite then of Botelho’s Historia, and moreover it cannot be said that the Discours did not leave its mark among Hispanic literatti.

Assuming the lofty vision of solemnly elevating the Adventures as “the poem of every nation, of every century and of every person”, years later, in 1796, Agustín García de Arrieta literally transferred much of that Discours to the Discurso preliminar of El Espíritu del Telemaco. An unusual text, the Espíritu was presented as dissociation between the fable and the political and moral maxims and reflections contained in the famous poem entitled The Adventures of Telemachus. And it took the form of a series of literary fragments conceptually arranged as voices in alphabetical order (García de Arrieta, 1796: Introductory speech). Such intent took a firm hold moreover at a moment –no doubt overdue- when the fixation of an accurate Spanish translation of the Adventures presented itself as urgent cause for reflection for Hispanic literature. Published in Antwerp by Henry and Cornelius Verdussen in 1712, and not as has been traditionally said in The Hague in 1713 edited by Adrien Moetjens, the first translation of the Adventures, and which had remained valid throughout the century via a succession of re-editions with few and insignificant modifications, appeared unsustainable in the context of conception of García de Arrieta’s Espíritu. On May 12, 1796 Nicolás Álvarez de Cienfuegos contacted Manuel Godoy, in his capacity as “Protector of the Arts”, to propose “a translation of the immortal Telemachus, of which, to our shame, we do not yet have a respectable version” (Álvarez de Miranda, 2009). And although Godoy’s response was negative, its basis proved to be his knowledge of the intentions of José de Covarrubias, which materialized in the publication in two volumes in 1797 and 1798, of his translation of Les aventures de Télémaque. Accused by Antonio de Capmany of symbolizing the barbarism of the translators who had been corrupting the Spanish language, with the publication to this effect of a critical Comentario, and against the backdrop of the lengthy argument between both on the pages of the Diario de Madrid, Covarrubias’s Telemachus ended up on the bonfire, in a dramatic staging of the translators frustration (Carpi, 2017; Álvarez de Barrientos, 1991: 191-195; Capmany, 1798). The fact that this had not the slightest impact upon the perceived need for a translation of Fénelon’s was immediately demonstrated by the editorial formalization of two new attempts: first, García de Arrieta’s in 1799, followed by Fernando Nicolás de Rebolleda’s version in 1803.

A decidedly Fenelonian sensibility was pervading the Hispanic cultural arena. For example, in 1795, while Jovellanos read the Adventures and Francisco de Pinilla translated into Spanish two vital texts pertaining to Fénelon’s stance in the dispute between ancients and moderns, the Dialogues sur l´éloquence and the Lettre à l´Académie, Madrid witnessed the premiere of Mozart’s Idomeneo, the most sublime expression of a myth, that of the King of Crete forced to sacrifice his son in fulfilment of a promise made to the gods, which had acquired renewed artistic and literary life since the publication of Telemachus[6]. With a libretto in Italian by Giambattista Verasco, inspired despite his own modification of the denouement and a reduction in the number of acts by the one composed by Antoine Danchet for Andre Campra in 1712, Mozart had in fact not only read the Adventures during his stay in Bologna in 1770, but in 1766, on the occasion of a journey from Holland to Paris, and after a pilgrimage to Cambrai, had also witnessed the fervent and passionate elegy delivered, Leopold Mozart, before Fénelon’s tomb (Starobinski, 2002: 15-30; Rushton, 1993: 69/71). Shortly before, or afterwards, appeared the Idomeneos of Eugenio Tapia or Álvarez de Cienfuegos himself, determined to translate the Adventures, while Fernando Sor presented on stage in 1797, in the Teatro de la Santa Cruz in Barcelona, his opera Telemaco nell´isola di Calipso (Valverde Sánchez, 2005: 265-291; Froldi, 2009: 59-73; Graeme, 2001: 133-135).

In fact it is impossible to dissociate from the notable acceleration of those years the extremely slow pace throughout the century of the transfer to Spanish of Fénelon’s texts, with almost half a century between the Antwerp edition of the Adventures and the appearance in Madrid, translated by Miguel José Fernández in 1758, of the Diálogo entre los muertos antiguos y modernos, and another decade between the appearance of los Diálogos and the publication in 1769 of the Tratado de la educación de las hijas. An acceleration to which García de Arrieta contributed with an ambitious programme in which the translation of the Adventures followed, as was announced in the Diario de Madrid of August 31, 1799, the enhancement of that year’s edition of his Espíritu with the translation into Spanish of another two texts by Fénelon: part of Examen de conscience sur les devoirs de la Royauté and all of his opuscula Sur la necéssité de former des Alliances, a presentation of Europe as a sort of republic that had enjoyed such success in the wake of Utrecht, to the extent of being published earlier in English, in 1720, than in its original language[7].

And in this context, in this Fenelonian environment so far from Botelho’s sight, García de Arrieta obviously did not miss the mark when he included Ramsay’s text in his Espíritu. And he could not do so because he was employing a reference of particular authority. Converted to Catholicism during his years in Cambrai alongside Fénelon, Ramsay had become a kind of executor of the latter’s legacy, complementing the definitive edition of the Adventures with not only the Discours, but also l´Histoire de la Vie de Fénelon published in 1723, and in which, as in his Essay philosophique sur le gouvenement civil (1721), he placed Fénelon’s political conceptions at the service of the Jacobite cause (Mansfield, 2015). Neither was Ramsey an unknown at the specific time when García de Arrieta was espousing his Discours. In 1798 there was a re-edition, as had occurred in 1784, and would happen again in 1805, of Francisco Savila’s 1732 translation of Les Voyages de Cyrus (1727), which had been published in 1738. It might however have been the case, and so it was, that between the Ramsey of the Discours and the Ramsay of the Voyages, in which the influence of Bossuet already present in his Essay became partial plagiarism, there were some kind of difference that was not limited to increasing opacity vis-à-vis his former engagement with Jacobinism (Ahn, 2011). Also blurred in the Voyages was his adhesion to the philosophy of Christian agrarianism, adopting a more nuanced position in the open dispute over with the response that the Dutch physician Bernard de Mandeville had issued from the other side of the Channel against Fénelon’s Adventures.

No image could have been more different from the esprit of Fénelon’s predicate, his evocation of Baetica and his projection of a reformed Salento, than that of the end of economic prosperity and political autonomy that was achieved when virtue occupied the role that vice, passions and interest had naturally played in the moral sieve of the sociability of a diaper. And that was the topic and matter, basically the moral, of The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn’d Honest, a poem written in London in 1705 and which embellished with a number of remarks, and an essay presented as An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue, was published in 1714 under the title Fable of Bees, with a subtitle that was a clear declaration of intent: or private vices, publick benefits (Hont, 2008: 387-395; Brooke, 2012: 149-159). With the participation of figures such as Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, aligned via their criticism of Mandeville amongst the advocates of an honest modernity of a Fenelonian ilk, or Montesquieu, Jean Francois Melon and Voltaire, with their alternative “neo-Colbertist idiom of the politics of luxury”, that was the debate the middle ground of which Ramsay sought to occupy with his Voyages (Mansfield, 2015: 193-203; Hont, 2005: 1-156; Berry, 1994: 126-175). Unlike the fate that awaited his Discours, that text which in Spanish was entitled Cyropedia would not appear as a source of authority in any of the contributions by Hispanic literature to the evolution of the dispute over luxury, beginning with the most ambitious of all these, the Historia del luxo y de las leyes suntuarias de España, published in Madrid in 1788 by Juan Sempere y Guarinos[8].

A SUBLIME IDEA OF THE ANCIENT CULTURE OF OUR HOMELANDTop

The reference to Montesquieu, Melon, Mirabeau or Genovesi when offering a definition of luxury was a clear declaration of the position Sempere was adopting with his Historia. Determined to ascribe to the civil constitution of the nation, and in particular to social inequality and the absence of free ownership, the origin of many of the evils attributed to luxury, that crusade against sumptuary laws required legislation that would assume the challenge of eradicating idleness and form part of a more systematic “radical reform of the fundamental principles of our monarchy” (Sempere, 1788: Prologue). And he did so by means of an analysis of luxury from both a moral and a political perspective, as a statesman and philosopher as Cadalso would say[9]. Thus, on the one hand, he embarked on a moral requalification like that sponsored shortly before by the bold pages of El Censor and which Juan Pablo Forner regarded as an attempt to “reconcile luxury with the gospel” inspired by David Hume. The Historia established as a “general rule” for the moral consideration of luxury, invoking Saint Thomas, that “vice is not in the things that man uses, but in the chaotic use of these”, to denounced in this manner the distancing from evangelical law of the moral criteria behind his denominational condemnation[10]. And on the other, in complementary fashion, and underlining the relevance it had to be granted in the political and social order, declared that luxury was “inevitable in the civil societies we inhabit and communicate with”. Introducing the ideas that were at the time stimulating a reorientation of Catholic morality in a more political direction, he was equally prepared to denounce the inappropriateness of the inclusion of luxury among the “vices that by their very nature lead to the destruction of society”, and to claim that “nothing civilizes men more than the multiplication of interests” (Sempere, 1788: Prologue, p. 22, I. p. 86 and II, p. 198; Portillo, 2007).

Sempere then was far from prepared to throw in the towel and assume the admonishment that Gerónimo José de Cabra’s scriptural reading in 1787 of the Espíritu del Señor Melon by Lorenzo Normante directed towards the possibility of believing that “luxury is the natural consequence of the politics or policy of nations” (Cabra, 1787: I:75-76). Rather, it took shape as the opposite of the language of the “abomination of luxury”, of which one of the most direct criticisms of “philosophers who have dared to argue that luxury is honest and useful” had been threat issued by Bishop Climent in his long and dense prologue to the second edition of Fleury’s Costumbres de los Israelitas, translated by Martínez Pingarrón in 1737, and which had had such an influence upon Fénelon’s vision of Baetica (Fleury, 1769: XIV y XXXVII-XLVI). Significantly, that image of Baetica was also a very present reference for Sempere when he called for an end to gaps in the knowledge of “our civil history” continuing to distort the approach to such a delicate issue (Sempere, 1788: Prologue and 14-23). In fact, his Historia was presented as a warning against the temptation to continue covering those gaps critical methodological standards via descriptions similar to that which Fénelon gave “of the first age of Spain” by representing it, “through the voice of a Phoenician, as the happiest and most enviable nation in the universe”. Which is why his Historia opens with the unusually long quotation from the fragment of the Adventures in which Adoan described Baetica to Telemachus and to Mentor. To condemn that “narrative” not only for “lacking truth”, but also “credibility”, seemed in fact to Sempere to be the first step in the regeneration of a civil history required to order the “variety of opinions with regard to luxury, in other words, in relation to one of the most important aspects of morality and politics” (Sempere, 1788: I, 1-5 and Dedication to the Count of Floridablanca).

By thus taking Fénelon’s Baetica into the terrain of credibility, Sempere was entering a dimension of the history of the reception of the Adventures in Hispanic literature that no longer related specifically to the debate over luxury. In fact, only twenty years prior to the publication of his Historia, that unusually long quotation from the speech by the Phoenician Adoan that opened his text had been very much at home in the second volume of the monumental Historia literaria de España with which brothers Pedro and Rafael Rodríguez Mohedano sought to highlight the achievements and the historical evolution of a native culture. Of a very different vocation to that of Sempere’s Historia, the same tone of cultural vindication which infused that Historia literaria dispelled any possible shadow of epistemological doubt vis-à-vis the historical validity of the “honorary testimony” of Baetica “provided by a foreign sage”: “although by its very nature the work has much poetic embellishment”, said the Mohedano, “fundamentally it is historical truth and it gives us a sublime idea of the ancient culture of our homeland” (Mohedano and Mohedano, 1768, II, I: 206-211). On the occasion of their univocal appeal in the cause of that fragment of the Aventures, both Historias came in that sense to show the distance that even at that moment could mediate in the critical arsenal with which the different immersions were undertaken in an ancient time (Fernández Albaladejo, 2015). But they also illustrated the very diverse sensibilities and aspirations with which a single motif, as was the case of the image of Baetica forged by Fénelon, could be called in cause. And García de Arrieta contributed moreover to complicating the case when, addressing the maxims and political reflections dissociated from the fable that were contained in the Adventures, he employed that same description of Baetica to lend substance to the entry Luxo in his Espíritu, thus oriented in very different terms to those advocated by Sempere in his Historia. As different and distant, furthermore, as were their respective interpretations of the relationship between history and poetry, a reflection in turn of no less divergent political conceptions of comprehension of the monarchy.

There was no doubting the fact that a gulf lay between Sempere’s consideration of Fénelon’s Baetica as a “narrative worthy of poets”, and this suitable “to entertain and enrapture the imagination”, but not to “persuade the comprehension”, and the question asked by García de Arrieta in the prologue of his translation of Batteux’s Principios filosóficos de la literatura: “If history brings out virtues, why cannot the prudence of Ulysses, the courage of Achilles, not kindle the same flame?” (Sempere, 1788: I, 4; Batteux, 1797: I, X-XI). But moreover, in a manner of speaking, it was in the nature and political condition of that fire where the divergence increased. Sempere yearned for a civil history that he regarded as indispensable in order to rethink the foundations of the specific internal order of the monarchy. While García de Arrieta abstractly extolled Telemachus as “a book of education of monarchies”. In a way, one thus perceived the Hispanic political future between the dates of the appearance of both books, radically conditioned by the French echoes of the historical disruption of a revolution. If the Historia was conceived in a context in which there was competition between approaches directed towards the acknowledgment of an incipient political education of the community for the determination of public interests, the Espíritu was seeking its place at a time of re-elaboration of the discourse that confined to the sovereign all that preparation for the guardianship of the common good (Portillo, 2000). Exactly what García de Arrieta, on the occasion of his translation of Batteux, preached in relation to literature and the arts: “these have never prospered except in just and happy kingdoms” (Batteux, 1797: Dedicatoria). The same, ultimately, as was preached on the subject of love for one’s country by that Forner so keen to neutralize the moral reclassification of luxury promoted by El Censor: “And do not believe, Gentlemen”, he said in the address he delivered on 23 November, 1794 at the annual meeting of the Seville Royal Economic Society, “that this excellent gift, essential basis for the prosperity of States, has no place, nor produces effective results, in certain forms of government where the people, destined only to obey, have only the vigour transmitted by the momentum emanating from the crown” (Forner, 1794: XXIV-XXV).

It was a question on which Forner insisted: “Many sophists who have kindled human corruption in order to augment the turbulence and crimes of mankind will tell you that there can only be love for one’s homeland where the people is the architect of its laws and its politics”. And for which he sought justification in history: “nothing would please me more than for these ardent patrons of plebeian freedom to show me where there has ever existed a genuinely law-making people”. An opinion he was able to enlarge and elucidate upon in historiographical mode referring to history stricto sensu in a Discurso sobre el modo de escribir y mejorar la historia de España in which his constant affirmation of the monarch as exclusive centre of monarchic policy was manifest in his declaration that the latter had to be of use “not only to the citizens, but principally to monarchs and public men”[11]. In its body would take shape both the “genuine patriotism” of those who wanted “our country to re-establish itself on its primitive plant of opulence and justice”, and the indifference to love for one’s country of those who “sought to reform their original constitution” acting with “speculative principles of a sterile philosophy, or of the republic formed by a dream”. Acknowledging that primitive times had bequeathed no history did not preclude harbouring hopes of “renewing the blessed principles of our homeland” and preventing it from falling into “reforming hands, always speaking about perfecting primitive times, but ruining them”. Baetica, or in the Forner’s words, “the golden age or century of Saturn in which men would live in perfect friendship”, could be “a fable, or a few minutes of truth from a time of innocence”. But this did not mean inferring that “it was merely a quaint and amusing description of the traveller Adoan’s journey from this country to the young Telemachus”. And less still if it were interpreted that centuries later that Baetica “portrayed with such grace by the poetry of the venerable Archbishop of Cambrai “had been reincarnated at the hands of Ferdinand the Saint, thus “the true father of our country”[12].

Therefore it was no longer a case of clarifying whether or not that Baetica was historically credible, as the Mohedano brothers had argued, or should be confined to the sphere of poetry, as Sempere advocated. Via his adherence to historical criticism Forner took a middle path, placing at the centre of the question a kingdom in which the picture painted by the “swan of Cambrai” had acquired irrefutable materiality. And on the basis of these premises the conclusion appeared evident: the future lay in the “rebirth of that ancient Baetica”. A future moreover that could be contemplated with optimism because the “the kings that modelled themselves upon the saintly King Ferdinand”, Charles III and Charles IV, were already working and paving the way for the newly created “Patriotic societies” to undertake their activity in an exercise of “practical love for one’s country”.

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The close of the 18th century did not diminish, initially at least, the discursive functionality attributed by Hispanic literature to the Fénelonian image of Baetica. Its conversion into authentic topos completed, and evidencing the ductility that facilitated its invocation from different discursive registers, that idyllic form of sociability would soon, at the hands of José Antonio de Zamacola, be put to the service of fuerismo and the claims regarding the ancient nature of the Basque language. His Historia de las naciones bascas required no convoluted reasoning in order to suggest that if there were a “corner of the globe” where “philosophical and social man” still enjoyed “the freedom with which God and nature had endowed him”, in other words, the kind of freedom that in “his portrait of ancient Spain” the “wise Fénelon” had attributed to the “inhabitants of Baetica”, that place was Vizcaya (Zamacola: 1818: 288-291). Zamacola thus formalized a use in territorial vein which had already been suggested since the mid-18th century, though for Andalusia before Vizcaya. Forner’s own discourse was a fine exponent of that use and conjugation. As was the Franco ilustrado, but with the difference that the inclusion once again of the long quotation formed by Adoan’s words led in this case towards a melancholic comparison between the lights of ancient and the shadows of modern Baetica (López de Cárdenas, 1775: I, 66-72). And averting that melancholy was precisely what Forner sought to do in focusing his attention less on Fénelon’s poetic original than on its sublime reincarnation in Ferdinand III.

In connection with the Baetica described in the Adventures, in Forner’s texts was present again the same Ferdinand III who half a century earlier had inspired Botelho de Moraes to illuminate his Telearch. Both took the same neo-Gothic path, with the difference however of the disparate functionality that whilst on that path they discovered in Fénelon’s writings, with Forner wielding the banner of that Baetica and Botelho bent on fraying it. An apparent paradox, but perhaps less the latter than the expression of the multitude of running through the complex game of triangulation established in the Hispanic 18th century between an indigenous culture traversed by a host of uncertainties and its relationship, with both its own past, and the languages and intellectual ideas spreading across Europe at the time.